Nervous Labor caucus passes last chance saloon

The Labor Party has just passed the point of no return behind a leader they fear has lost his sense of direction.

If the Labor Party wanted to dump
Kevin Rudd
and replace him with
Julia Gillard
, yesterday was the day they should have done it. It was the last normal caucus meeting in what will quite probably be the last parliamentary sitting week before the general election.

A short distance away from where the Labor Party was passing up the opportunity to taking a gamble with Julia, the opposition was also meeting for possibly the last time before poll.

But there was no doubt in the minds of Coalition MPs about who would be leading them to the election. In a statement which only a few months ago would have sounded absurd,
Tony Abbott
told his MPs that they were within reach of “a famous victory". But last night he tried to play down this comment.

So spectacularly have the fortunes of our political leaders been transformed! And the mood in the opposing party rooms reflected this transformation.

Among Coalition MPs, even those most from the camp of the loyal supporters of former opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull talked positively about the chances of a historic Coalition election victory.

Petro Georgiou
, retiring MP for Kooyong and an unlikely ally of Mr Abbott, talked positively of the chance of victory. There was no such thing as an unwinnable election, he said.

In contrast to the Coalition’s optimism, in the Labor caucus, the mood was palpably apprehensive. MPs who not long ago had believed they would comfortably retain their seats were now in the uncomfortable position of knowing that they might be attending the last caucus meeting of their careers.

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MPs who line up in parliamentary question time to ask tame Dorothy Dix questions arranged by ministers to talk about their portfolios, lined up to direct some curly questions of their own to Mr Rudd and his ministers. This was the question time that mattered yesterday.

About a dozen Labor MPs joined in, recognising that it might be their last chance to get the Prime Minister’s attention on grievances their constituents hold and which the government must deal with to shore up its political position.

These concerns ranged from the resource super profits tax to asylum seekers. Underlying all the concerns raised was a single theme: The government’s (i.e. Mr Rudd’s) failure to get a clear and positive message across to voters.

Mr Rudd said he heard what his MPs were saying and accepted he needed to lift his game. But to the despair of his anxious MPs, in parliament a short time later he made a meal of trying to rule out any chance the government would take up Ken Henry’s idea that a resource super profits tax could be applied more widely than to the mining industry.

One consolation for Mr Rudd on a tough day was an analysis of the opinion polls by former ALP national secretary Bob McMullan. No government, he tried reassure the caucus, had lost an election when it had a two-party preferred vote advantage (the latest Newspoll put the ALP’s two-party preferred vote at 52 per cent) at this point in the political cycle. And no opposition leader with Mr Abbott’s disapproval rating (49 per cent) had gone on to become prime minister.

But for caucus, the final part of the election journey is going to be white-knuckled ride.